Ubuntu Testing Week

The Ubuntu MATE team is delighted to be a part of Ubuntu Testing Week which starts today (3rd April) until 8 April along with the other flavours in the Ubuntu family. Please join us in testing the beta of Ubuntu MATE 20.04 (Focal Fossa) as well sharing the by testing out some of the other flavours.

There are many way ways of testing. A spare machine, a secondary hard drive, a live USB, or using a VM (Virtual Machine). If you are planning on using a VM, you may be interested in trying Quickemu which allows you to easily manage QEMU VM's with a shell script. We hope you will join in and help us make Ubuntu MATE 20.04 and all of it's family a success

Website refresh

Coinciding with this beta release we are also unveiling the all new Ubuntu MATE website As you can see from the Ubuntu Testing Week information above, the new site a rammed full of useful information about the project, it's history and how to get involved. Go and take a look round, there is so much more to discover

I'd like to extend my thanks and huge appreciation to @lah7, @franksmcb and @madhens for all their hard work in creating our new fabulous new website. Thank you!

Yeah, that's the intention for LTS now. Five two years is way too short for "Long-term" anyway in the server space, and for average people it usually means they don't have to deal with upgrading at all if they bounce from LTS to LTS by virtue of using a new machine.

It's going to be an awesome release. MATE 1.24 has a lot of improvements and features, along with the distro itself. I'm glad that I was able to contribute to some degree. Thanks and appreciation to the team!

So then, should Canonical use that term public-facing and call any LTS greater than two years ESM releases? I think LTS has become more ambiguous over time, excising the ambiguity before it gets worse for people, where you have to explain one term can mean any variety of things would be great idea to reduce the likelihood of confusion when multiple LTS releases are active.